1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of on-line catalogs, and more particularly to centrally maintaining the data representing items of an on-line catalog so that multiple applications can operate on the same data to produce uniform results for a number of different entities.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advent of Internet based commerce, organizations on both the buy and sell side of business-to-business (B2B) procurement relationships have sought to harness computer networks as a means for automating the procurement process between them. To facilitate e-commerce, and particularly e-procurement, suppliers of goods and services have developed electronic catalogs by which potential buyers can electronically receive and display information regarding the goods and services offered by the supplier, including descriptive information, pictures and prices.
For many reasons, a seller does not often find it desirable to supply the same catalog to all buyers. It may be preferable for a catalog targeted to businesses to have a different product focus than a catalog for individual consumers, and the scope of products in a catalog may vary from one type of business to another, as well as from one type of consumer to another. For example, the types of computers and peripherals offered to businesses may provide higher performance and as a result are more costly than computer equipment targeted toward consumers. The types of goods and services marketed to one type of business often vary significantly from those targeted toward another type of business. Moreover, buyers that purchase high volumes of products/services will often negotiate unique pricing agreements with sellers that afford significant discounts compared to lower volume purchasers. Thus, it would be highly desirable from the seller""s perspective for each buyer or group of buyers to have their own unique catalog, one that is customized to reflect the individual product interests of each customer or customer group, as well their unique business processes and relationships.
For a seller carrying many different items (or providing many classes and types of services), maintaining even one version of an e-catalog having one pricing scheme can be extremely difficult. To maintain several custom versions of an electronic catalog, to each of which multiple pricing schemes may be applied, a physical manifestation of each custom version for each pricing scheme is typically created and each version must be maintained and updated as the catalog data and pricing schemes change. Each time a product or service is added, its attributes or attribute values are changed, or the pricing scheme changes, every physical manifestation of a version of the catalog must be individually updated to ensure that each version reflects the changes in the catalog data and pricing. Each version essentially is obsolete until updated.
Although each version of an electronic catalog is maintained by computer, the fact that an update must be performed for each existing version of the catalog can be time-consuming, labor intensive and prone to error. Moreover, updating multiple versions of the catalog each having the potential for multiple pricing schemes is made even more onerous because they typically reside at different physical locations, to many of which the seller has no direct access. For example, some versions of the catalog may have been published to buyers"" proprietary retail web sites, some to public marketplace web sites and still other versions to procurement networks. These common repositories for at least a subset of a seller""s catalog information typically are not directly accessible to the seller for making direct updates to the catalog information. Rather, catalog updates for these buyers typically must occur somewhat indirectly and through the cooperation of the buyer. In these contexts, the buyer usually performs the ultimate integration of the custom versions of the catalog into the buyer""s web site or procurement network.
Thus, for the seller to provide customized versions of its catalogs to all of its potential customers, prior art techniques have required the seller to assume a tremendous administrative burden to maintain the various versions of and pricing schemes for its catalog, leading to discrepancies and errors. For example, some versions may continue to include products or services no longer offered by the seller. Another error that can occur is that some of the prices in a version of the catalog have become obsolete. Buyers attempting to purchase products or services still in the catalog but no longer available through the seller will not be happy that they were inconvenienced in such a manner. Obsolete prices can mean lost money to a seller if new higher prices are not reflected by a custom version of the seller""s catalog. Thus, trying to maintain and update so many versions of a catalog becomes risky as well as labor-intensive, which tends to offset many of the advantages of providing electronic catalogs.
Another problem faced by sellers is how to hierarchically organized the items for each version of the catalog for browsing by potential buyers. Because each version of the catalog may contain a different scope of the set of catalog items, browsing hierarchies are preferably created for each version of the catalog. It is preferable that the scope of the browse hierarchy is reasonably coextensive with the scope of the items in the catalog with which it is associated.
It would be desirable from the seller""s perspective if the seller had a single tool by which all catalog data could be maintained in a central database and in one physical location. It would be further desirable if customized versions of its catalogs, custom-pricing profiles, and custom browse hierarchies could all be generated using the centrally maintained database. Moreover, it would be desirable if the single tool could also be used to maintain customer accounts for each of its various buyers and buyer groups, including the assignment of each buyer or buyer group to a version of the catalog, a pricing scheme and a browse hierarchy having a scope reasonably coextensive with the assigned catalog version. Finally, it would also be desirable if the seller were coupled to the catalog database through a network such as the Internet, by which seller-authorized users could maintain the database, establish buyer accounts, and present the customized versions of its catalog data to its buyers on a virtual basis, rather than publishing and delivering physical manifestations of the customized versions.
One embodiment of the maintenance tool of the invention imports data representative of catalog items into a database. The data is stored in a format that facilities maintenance of the data. Rule sets are established that define the scope of custom catalogs, each of which is published from the data in the database for one or more organizations. In one embodiment, a primary browse hierarchy is established that is representative of the items represented by the data in the catalog. Custom browse hierarchies are generated for each of the custom catalogs from the primary hierarchy to be representative of the scope catalog items comprising the custom catalog for which it is generated. In one embodiment, pricing profiles are established that specify none, one or more pricing adjustments to be made to a subset of the items in the database. The adjustments are made to initial prices established for the items in the database. Each customer is assigned to one of the pricing profiles.